Our New Real Is The Surreal

Linus Coraggio, Anthony Haden-Guest, Irena Jurek, Orlan, Bill Plympton, Genesis P-Orridge, Wilhelm Shenrok, Kuzma Vostrikov, Ajuan Song

Dada was an absurdist reaction to a Europe marching through World War I. It brought together a bunch of live wires who were not always compatible (George Grosz despised Kurt Schwitters’ practice) but who re-charged the art world. World War II produced the Situationists and kicked the stuffing out of the Ecole de Paris, ushering in the triumph of American painting. Vietnam was the womb of the Counter Culture. Our current times though are far more disturbing, convincingly pre-apocalyptic, so how are artists responding? Good question. Our New Real is the Surreal suggests a few answers.

A return to the recognizable image is clearly one of them. The images that Orlan and Genesis P-Orridge, Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song present are a high-octane mix of comedy and fright, the real, the hyper-real, and the unreal but, no, it’s not the same old, same old. Dada, the Surrealists, and the Situationists had been effective pictorial and verbal troublemakers because they operated in what had seemed a timeless world. Okay, there had been a Russian revolution, but Europe was an ecosystem of monarchies, churches, a smug, impregnable but easy-to-scandalize bourgeoisie, ruling classes, and a pompous political class—juicy targets all.

This is a different world. And for artists too. It is, for one thing, a world in which the Schwitters practice, namely picking up bits and pieces, has triumphed. And that’s a practice in which Linus Coraggio, a veteran street artist of the Rivington School, has produced a richly varied body of work. It is also a different world in that the brilliant nihilism of Dada and inventive Surrealist fantasies are now our daily diet in the real world news. So where is the artist to go? You’ll get clues in Our New Real is The Surreal. Oh, yes. You’ll see a few cartoons by me there too. Why? Well, the artist’s statement has never appealed to me much, so I’ll just say that there has been some (legitimate) anxiety here about the role of AI and Robotics in art making. But AI and robots can’t do humor. Yet.

- Anthony Haden-Guest